Not to taunt you--I just like to SAY aubergine. As Harters said, it's a great word. So rich and smacks of luxury. I like periwinkle, too, but not to eat and not on a car. I hear you--aubergines aren't only purple.

Anybody interested the Sinaloa style Stuffed Eggplant recipe in "Larousse de la Cocina Mexicana" is incredibly good... and the eggplant-apple stuffing works well with the little Thai Eggplants that are now easy to find at Whole Foods & many farmer's markets.

Cosby was pimping Jell-O before Syd Barret got fat and shaved his eyebrows. Maybe the Coz could have done the voiceover: HOOOw can you have your JELL-O brand PUD-ding if you DON't eat your mEEEEt? (Excuse the poor attempt at transcribing his weird enunciation.) Or maybe not. Having Toni Tennille sing backup was a bad enough idea.

Maybe it's the dialect I learned, but I do not find that German food words sound harsh, though sometimes punctuated. You can hear the crispy coating as you say Frikadelle. But in general the word is cradled in the hollow on top of the tongue. Even saying "wurst" properly gets your lips pursed a little to accept the sausage between them.

I'm not quite the fan of Frikadelle either. Which is why I call them Fleischpflanzerl. Fleischküchle, however, sound rather revolting. And why serve Hähnchen when you can dine on far more melifluous Hendl?

I take it you get your Senf down out of the Chuchichastli. Odd that though I lived in "la Suisse romande" but had to learn Hochdeutsch at school, so that when I went to Zuerich I couldn't communicate at ALL.

Actually I find Schwyzerdütsch completely unintelligible. I learned Hochdeutsch but because I have now a largely Bavaro-Austrian set of friends, I tend to use their German terms. The neutral Swiss, however, have yet to force their Rösti down my throat.

But you have continued the tradition of Secretaries-General of the United Nations with awesome names: Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is an awesome name, and not one in a thousand Americans can pronounce it. (I'm one of the 0.1% who can.)

I have a British friend who likes to say that Dutch is not a language, it's a throat disease. But he's monolingual, what does he know? ;-)

Actually, Yiddish is no more gutteral than many regional variants of German itself.

The back-of-the-throat "ch" doesn't bother me as such, I went to Hebrew school so it's part of my standard phoneme lineup, but the combination of that with "krep" in kreplach is almost comically nasty. It echoes of crap, crepuscular, and cripple - and the singular of kreplach is krepl, which even on its own isn't very nice.

Mmm, munch a bunch of crunchy lunch! Any discussion of lunch always reminds me of that bit from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question, How can we eat? the second by the question, Why do we eat? and the third by the question, Where shall we have lunch?"

Which in turn reminds me of that Deep Thought, forgive me for paraphrasing poorly as I can't find it online—something like: "Sometimes I think about all the misery in the world and I want to cry. But then I think, Aw, who cares? And then I think, What's for dinner?"